Google sets limits of 100 links per page - but why?

Questioning the implications and variations to Google's linking guidelines.

[Whitey]

Google's guidelines are clear enough on the number of links on a page,

[google.com...]

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Is this internal, external or a combination of both?

And what implications is Google discussing; it won't crawl effectively, it will reduce page strength [ PR ] that passes to another page , or more?

Does anyone claim to have knowledge that can expand on this guideline from Google?

[Frederic1]

I think that putting less than 100 links per page is just an advice for readability. But Google will follow 300+ links on a single page I think.

If you look here [news.google.com...] you will see that there are over 300 links on the same page.

[photopassjapan]

My experience is that the number of links followed from a page may very well be affected by pagerank and age. I've overseen sites with much less links where you had to wait for two weeks for googlebot to get back on following even the navigation from the index... and on the other hand, a different, well established site has like 200+ links on its front, is waaay over 100k in size and the links get crawled wonderfully every other day. With the pages indexed.

A startup site would probably be better off with fewer links on its pages. On a PR 5-6+ site which has been around for years this just doesn't seem to be a factor.

If I was Google I would phrase this guideline as follows:

"If your site is not important, you CAN put up more links, but we won't index them anyway."

And implement a new rule for googlebot... or refine it if it's already there... that it isn't the number of links that should count, but the percentage of text WITH and WITHOUT links on them. So they could finally get rid of the domain parking ad-sites masking themselves as search results/directories/blogs.
But who am i kidding, right? 99.9 percent of those sites serve adsense ads.

Also, internal vs outbound links may also be an interesting factor. Not inbound vs outbound, that's just plain silly. Internal vs. outboud. And whether those internal links are actual pages or just... links.

And now I have no idea what I'm talking about.

General answer: there seems to be no penalty in having more links than 100. They just never get crawled until you reach the ranks in age and Pagerank where googlebot will have the patience to follow them.

[Bewenched]

I have seen this as well .. a competitor of mine has a site index .. if that's what you want to call it.. but it is multiple pages, each showing links to internal pages (about 75 or so) then at the bottom nearly 300 links .. simply labled 1-300 .. this goes from page to page like this.

Definately not user friendly and built only for the bots. Seems to work for them and I've briefly thought about doing it for ours, but it just looks so crappy to a user that actually lands on it.

[Halfdeck]

But Why?

Think of it this way. Google wants to index pages that people link to. What does that say about a page with 1000 links?